I’m prepping a 3.5e Dark Sun campaign and familiarising myself with the ruleset. Was wondering what happens if you try to cast a wizard spell from inside defiled terrain? Could swear that I saw a rule (years ago…) that said you increased the existing area’s radius, but can’t find that in the latest v8 version of the ruleset. Am I overlooking? Or do you default to “Obsidian plains are completely devoid of plant life. If arcane spellcasters have no alternative energy sources, they are unable to cast spells in this terrain”, on p118?
So far for the serious question, now for some stupid fun.
I’m definitely overthinking this, but if you need to ‘touch grass’ to cast spells, that means defilers handicap themselves a lot because they constantly need to move. Or can handicap other wizards by blocking their casting with the Distant Raze feat. Would be a killer tactic - just hold your action.
But then if you could just keep drawing in power from a defiled area’s edge by increasing its radius, how far can you reach, and is there a downside or limit to that? Playing around in Excel, I think a level 20 wizard could lay down a 900 ft defiled circle in one day’s worth of spell slots. And if they’re willing to each do that each day, cover the entire Earth in 200 years. Once they cover a large enough area, every other wizard in the defiled area starts adding to its radius as they draw in energy. Of course part of those spell slots will be used to kill all defilers, because Dammit, That Was My Garden
My recollection is that it increases the defiled area (but I don’t have a source). I’d also argue that casting additional spells in a defiled area might give you a penalty to your initiative too since you have to draw magic from further away. At some point your radius would increase fractions of an inch once the radius got large enough.
Hi Raddu, thanks for the welcome! Long-time lurker at Athas.org here. I first played in Dark Sun in the 1990s and then briefly in the 2000s, always been thinking about running a campaign in it myself. Been DMing for close to 30 years and somehow it never happened. Here goes.
I went through the previous iterations of the 3e rules, and they don’t have the area increase either. Could have sworn…oh well.
Fully agree that increasing the defiled terrain’s area is the logical way to go. And then radius increases as the square of the spell level, so diminishing increase as you get to bigger and bigger circles. But I’m not going to be playing around with square roots and fractional 5ft-squares at the table – better to increase radii by discrete blocks that blob out of the previous circle? I’m leaning to having the DM decide which squares get targeted, or have a table with a scatter effect (I want to avoid players getting too tactical with these placements unless they have the distant raze feat.)
The thing is, I could have sworn that the rule I read specifically increased the radius of the effect - just add the new spell slots as 5ft. increments to the old radius. And then the surface area increases quadratically. Which leads to a single level-20 caster being able to dessicate the globe in 200 years of every-day casting. Faster if they stretch their defiling to gain the +1 caster level for a 5ft extra radius
So, I’d say that’s an optional rule that is at the DM’s desecration. @raddu can speak to it better than I, but the Athas.org 3.5e Rules seem to defer to the 2e rules when they don’t bother to cover something (for instance, there aren’t any water usage rules in the 3.5e Rules - we had to leverage some from 2e and include them in the back of Adventures in the Dead Lands).
Personally, I’d totally use this expanding radius rule in my 3.5e game, but YMMV.
Thanks Adam! I’m very happy I posted my question here. Quick and very helpful replies. I did read the original rulesets -years ago- so that must be how the radius rule got stuck in my head. Good to know I can fall back on the 2e text for tough questions. And I see that I misremembered it a bit, so thanks for refreshing my memory there. (Why my brain doesn’t just store rulebooks I read 20 years ago verbatim, I don’t know )
It’s great to see how the thinking has both evolved and stayed close to the original ideas. As someone who edits complex documents from time to time: hat off to the Athas.org crew for truly impressive work keeping things consistent, in touch with new editions and recognizable from the older perspective.
